Taking Liberties is that rarest of things – a low budget British documentary released in the cinema. It covers a subject that’s very close to my heart, the reduction of civil liberties we’ve seen under the premiership of Tony Blair over the last ten years.
It tells its tale using a combination of archive clips, illustrative pieces of old film, and fresh interviews and pieces.
The film takes turns in examining the loss of several liberties including the right to protest, free speech, privacy, detention without trial, extradition and torture. It does these in a clever and witty manner.
Right from the beginning, you’re scared quite what the authorities are now able to do. We’re accompanying three coach loads of middle aged people who want to protest at an American airforce base. There are a lot of police watching them. They decide to turn the coaches around. There’s no discussion. These are peaceful people. The police force the coach to return all the way to London. The drivers aren’t even allowed to stop at service stations.
Some of the areas it covers are obvious, but at other times, even someone who likes to think they’re aware what’s going on is shocked by what they see. So we meet someone who’s basically a prisoner in his own home. He’s a suspected terrorist, yet he hasn’t been charged with anything. Instead, he’s under virtual house arrest, with a tag preventing leaving an arbitrary area around his North London home.
And I never expected to feel sympathy for a member of the NatWest 3. These, you’ll remember, are three ex-bankers who have been extradited to the US. The member in the film even acknowledges that he’s not likely to be the most loved person. Yet, with no evidence whatsoever, the British Government is happy to ship him off to America, where he must sit around and await a trial.
Of course there are sections on ID Cards, and there are bits on Torture. They cheekily use a clip of 24 which does indeed tend to suggest that torture works. It probably does help the populace at large believe that torture really does work. It doesn’t of course. I’ll tell you anything you want to hear if you start to hurt me.
The only problem I have with this film is that it’s not going to be seen very widely. I rather suspect that most of the people who go along and see it will be the converted. I watched it at an early-evening midweek screening that wasn’t especially busy. And I can’t see that it’s going to be very easy to get shown on TV because it is enormously partisan.
That said, I hope the DVD is released nice and cheaply and passed around as much as possible. It really is scary what is happening while we sit back and let it happen. We really are letting the terrorists win and we lose our freedoms.
The film’s website is here.